O Holy Night” is faith in full poetic flower. It tells how lost the world was before Christ came; it reminds us “His law is love and His Gospel is peace”; it makes falling to our knees seem less like submission and more like coming home.
So it comes as a surprise to learn that the author, Placide Cappeau de Roquemaure, was not a devout man of God. He was a nineteenth-century wine merchant who attended church sporadically and later gave it up altogether.
When a priest asked him to write a poem for Christmas, de Roquemaure came up with “Cantique de Noel.” So impressed was he by it that he asked a friend to set it to music. His friend, composer Adolphe-Charles Adam, may have been a man of God. He was also Jewish.
The priest loved the end result, and the hymn rapidly became a favorite in French churches. But when its provenance was discovered, the French establishment declared it unfit for church use.
Ten years later, in 1857, John Sullivan Dwight translated it for an American audience. Abolitionists heard the lines “Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother; and in His name all oppression shall cease,” and they adopted the song as an anthem for their struggle.
Preempting the Christmas truce of World War I, a French soldier in the Franco-Prussian War leapt from his trench on Christmas Eve 1871. He stood, unarmed, in no-man’s-land and serenaded the enemy with “O Holy Night.”
On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden made what may well have been the first radio broadcast of speech and music. He quoted from the Gospel of Luke (on which de Roquemaure based his poem), then took out his violin and played “O Holy Night” to the world.
The message of that “night divine” is still being spread, in the most surprising ways and by the most unexpected people.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
LUKE 2:10